Hubble | Common News Update

Jan222018 by adminNo Comments

Watch: Hubble video offers 3D tour through the Orion Nebula

Science

Jan. 19 (UPI) -- Want to take a virtual ride through the Orion Nebula? Hubble has the ticket.Scientists at Hubble used visible and infrared light data to create a 3D journey through the famed nebula. Visible light observations were captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and infrared data was observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope.Scientists first combined the two datasets to create 2D images and then converted the images into a 3D video."As the camera flies into the star-forming region, the sequence cross-fades back and forth between the visible and infrared views," scientists wrote in the video's caption. "The glowing gaseous landscape has been illuminated and carved by the high energy radiation and strong stellar winds from the massive hot stars in the central cluster."Infrared data, wh...

Jan162018 by adminNo Comments

Hubble image showcases cluster with mass of three million billion suns

Science

Jan. 16 (UPI) -- A new image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shows what the mass of three million billion suns looks like. The image, shared Tuesday by NASA, features ACT-CLJ0102-4915, a massive cluster known as El Gordo -- Spanish for "The Fat One."El Gordo is the biggest, brightest and hottest galaxy cluster found in the distant universe. It's located 7 billion light-years from Earth.As revealed by a trio of telescopes in 2012, including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, El Gordo is actually the product of two galaxy clusters, which are in the millions-of-years-long process of colliding.The formation and evolution of galaxy clusters is thought be heavily influenced by dark matter. The study of galaxy clusters can help astrophysicists better understand dark matter and dark energy."...

Dec122017 by adminNo Comments

Hubble reveals star cluster Messier 79 doing snow globe impression

Science

Dec. 12 (UPI) -- A Hubble Space Telescope image features the star cluster Messier 79 doing its best snow globe imitation. The mass of stars is a "globular" cluster, after all.Globular clusters are gravitationally bound collections of stars. The cluster most recently framed by Hubble's lens hosts roughly 150,000 stars -- small potatoes compared to some clusters, which can feature up to a million stars.M79's stars are packed into a sphere-like shape stretching just 118 light-years across. The star globe is positioned within the constellation Lepus, 41,000 light-years from Earth.Stellar clusters are typically centered around the central hub of our spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, but Messier 79 -- sometimes called NGC 1904 -- is found far from our galactic center. Some astronomers estimate the c...

Sep142017 by adminNo Comments

Hubble spots black, super hot exoplanet

Science

Sept. 14 (UPI) -- New analysis of an oft-studied exoplanet suggests the alien world reflect almost no light -- it's surface is pitch black, making it nearly invisible.A surface's reflectivity is known as its albedo. Researchers measured the albedo of WASP-12b using the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope."The measured albedo of WASP-12b is 0.064 at most," Taylor Bell, a grad student in astronomy at McGill University in Montreal, said in a news release. "This is an extremely low value, making the planet darker than fresh asphalt!"And like asphalt on a sunny summer day, WASP-12b gets extremely hot. The exoplanet is also about twice the size of Jupiter. Thus, scientists categorize the exoplanet as a "hot Jupiter."Few hot Jupiters are as hot as WASP-12b, which or...

Jul92017 by adminNo Comments

Hubble captures image of 'hidden galaxy'

Science

July 7 (UPI) -- The Hubble Space Telescope captured the IC 342, a challenging space target due to its thick glowing gas, dark, bright stars and obscuring dust.The IC 342, also known as the Hidden Galaxy, sits near the equator in the Milky Way's galactic disk, where the haze of glowing cosmic gas, dark, obscuring dust and bright stars was captured in an image released by NASA on Friday.Scientists had to look through a large amount of material contained within our own galaxy to view the intricate spiral structure of IC 342.IC 342 gets its name of the Hidden Galaxy because of difficulty viewing it, and it would be among the brightest galaxies in the sky if it wasn't obscured by cosmic dust.The very active galaxy is a mixture of hot, blue star-forming regions, redder, cooler regions of gas, an...